Turning Fear into... Orgasm?

by OneTaste Living Library Nov 12, 2013

Orgasm and alchemy: it has recently dawned on me the profound degree to which these two are interrelated.

Alchemy, simply put, is the process of transmutation. Lead to gold. In the realm of relating and intimacy, it refers to a metaphoric transmutation—basically transmuting myriad forms of fear into love—into power—into turn on.

Lately it has become more and more clear to me how essential this ingredient is to living an orgasmic life. Orgasm as a realm of experience is full of a tremendous amount of charge. That is what makes it so potent. Ultimately that is the reason we want to delve into it.

So what happened to me before becoming an alchemist was I would enter into an orgasmic experience (I’m using orgasm in a broad sense here*), and I would immerse deeply. The ride was literally the experience of freedom, internal freedom in the midst of an unfree world, and it would last for some period of time. Then invariably at some point, all kinds of calcification would arise: all the backed up fear, anger, shame, confusion, toxins in my system from living in disconnection the other 99% of the time.

Without any capacity to alchemize what gets drawn to the surface, I would get knocked out. Without any conscious awareness of why, I would usually seek the help of an alchemist. Someone who could cast a different light on the process I had just been through. Someone who could see through the fog and contraction that had just formed around my experience, and point me back to the thing that drew me into the experience in the first place: orgasm.

Or there would be times when the help of an alchemist was not available to me. In these instances, I would just have to wait. The stirred-up toxic calcifications in my system would eventually settle back down. I would return to balance again, to a homeostatic resting pulse. From there I could contemplate returning to a state of orgasm. And I would. And then, the process would repeat and I would rapidly hit the wall once again. This was my understanding of the orgasmic cycle: enter into a brief but potent experience, suffer some combination of some form of psychic backlash combined with external consequences, contract, take a disproportionately long time to recover, and repeat.

The sad part is that as painful as that cycle was, it was still worth it to me. To gain access to that potent place was compelling enough for me to put up with that arduous, pre-alchemical cycle, the painful trek through miles of desert for one drink of water. I thought that was just how it works.

Then a flip happened at some point where I discovered I could be the one to expand my system, to have a concentrated enough practice that had me burn hot enough inside to denature those concentrations of pain and trauma and release the stored power. I found I could do that not only for myself, but for others as well. And then it began to catalyze towards more and more alchemy, since everything that people were coming to me with, their fear and stuckness, was all being added in as more fuel to turn into orgasm.

It grows and accelerates in that fashion.

Alchemy is like keeping the engine of orgasm clear of pollutants and foreign objects. A clogged engine can only run so fast. And the faster it moves without being clear, the more damage is done. The analogy is remarkably similar in orgasm. Orgasm knows not to emerge when it will do harm.

The extent to which there is capacity for alchemy is the extent to which orgasm can flow.

*my favorite definition I heard from OneTaste Senior Faculty Rachel Cherwitz: Orgasm is the state of the involuntary musculature becoming activated, combined with a flow state of consciousness